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Just make it cheaper, no matter how....
if somebody find a way to make good business nuking the moon, they will go ahead....romantic people can still watch Breakfast at Tiffany's...
Tides? Who needs tides? Fishes? who cares?
I will have my new Ferrari to drive, a longer yatch and a luxurious flat in Aspen....

I was just in Belize a few weeks ago and while the destruction of any Mayan ruins is tragic, I don't think Nohmul was quite what it's being made out to be. The few pictures I could find of the actual Nohmul temple are much different than the picture in the linked article. I remember no mention of it when trying to select ruins to go see. It doesn't seem like it was a big tourist draw.

I was at Laminai and that is a truly impressive set of structures. There are lots of unexcavated buildings still there and the remarkable thing is that the look just like hills. Though it's a stretch, it's not outside the realm of possibility that workers at Noh mul were unaware of the significance of what looked like a pile of rocks until they started working. The landowner surely would have known.

Bullshit. They excavated the material for road fill, they knew exactly what it was and the quality of the material they would obtain and how much money they would save paying for quarried material trucked to the site. You do not just use any passing dirt for road fill because it will be impossible to compact properly and could be subject to extreme bulking when exposed to water, you do not randomly excavate hills because you do not know what they constitute and how difficult they will be to excavate.

You win the prize for civil construction ignorance as do those who thought your ignorance was informative. Even ancient Romans knew better than you http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads [wikipedia.org] please check diagram at bottom of article.

The greedy shit head owner of the company knew exactly what they were doing and how much they would save.

Visual impressiveness is rarely an indication of archaeological importance. In fact, something that looks like a pile of rocks is often a structure that hasn't been studied yet. The fantastic pyramids and temples you see are often the result of best-guess reconstruction.

I agree. My point was that in the few pictures I was able to find of it prior to being destroyed, it didn't look like much more than what could have been a natural limestone formation covered by vegetation. Again I think it's a stretch, but it's possible the workers didn't realize they were digging up a temple. After reading some of the local news coverage though, this seems very unlikely.

Anyway, I'm disappointed that the article pictured the wrong temple and I suspect that it might have been intentional.

Anyway, I'm disappointed that the article pictured the wrong temple and I suspect that it might have been intentional.

Agreed. Also buried in the article: the site has been very thoroughly worked over by archeologists over the decades, and there are archeologists who see this as an opportunity to study the lower layers that would have been impossible before.

So is this bad? I'd certainly say so. But in reality, a degraded monument not in current use was destroyed. The biggest shame in my mind is that the archeologists weren't given the opportunity to disassemble it. I certainly hope future civilizations don't spend too much

Okay, the pyramid was on privately owned land. Time to check and see what the land owner wanted to do with the land that the pyramid was getting in the way of. Or, perhaps he was just concerned that all these tourists were coming to this pyramid and he wasn't getting anything out of it. And the insurance liability, Suppose someone were climbing around on this thing and fell, even if they were illegal trespassers would he be responsible? There are a number of very good legal reasons why he's want to have this hazard removed. On top of that, I understand the price of gravel is very high these days.

As much as I hate the idea of expropriating land from private owners, if you want to really preserve these sorts of things you've got to remove them from private ownership and recompense the land owner either with money or a swap of some new land of equal value. As long as these sorts of things are in private ownership, this will continue.

My bet is that the government purchased the rock for their road projects. Look to India, you will find vast numbers of people that are enslaved by the government to crush rock for their roads (paid about $25/month for a family to fill a truck with sand/gravel). There won't be charges, because it will lead back to themselves.

As much as I hate the idea of expropriating land from private owners, if you want to really preserve these sorts of things you've got to remove them from private ownership and recompense the land owner either with money or a swap of some new land of equal value.

Or just accept that land ownership comes with certain restrictions. For example, if I want an addition to my house, I can't just build whatever I want; I need to get permits and ensure that the construction complies with building codes. Saying "no, you cannot knock down this ancient structure which was built millennia ago on what now happens to be your land" strikes me as a reasonable counterpart to that.

except that falls flat when people have homes that have been regulated to this status where they can't modernize them. Often times they'll be rotting out from under them but due to ordnance they can't fix it.

According to the article such laws are already in place but it didn't stop this from happening. It was on private land and the landowner for want of cash sold the gravel or for want of another use of the land had it cleared.

It's going to be very interesting to follow as everyone points to someone else and says I just did what he told me to do.

The problem with that solution is that Belize is not a wealthy country and the government is not in a position to buy up all the land that contains Mayan ruins. There are thousands of un-excavated buildings located all over the country.

The alternative to a money compensation was mentioned as a swap for land of equal value. Since someone is going to make an issue of that then swap them for some land in the city where smaller parcels are valued higher and, hopefully, all the excavation for relics has already been done.

As much as I hate the idea of expropriating land from private owners, if you want to really preserve these sorts of things you've got to remove them from private ownership and recompense the land owner either with money or a swap of some new land of equal value. As long as these sorts of things are in private ownership, this will continue.

You mean, as long as we embrace the notion of private property so that we may enable rent-seeking, this will continue. No one should have the right to simply bulldoze the past.

Sadly, you're dead wrong. All I ever got in school was unbridled paeans to glorious capitalism. I got plenty of anti-religious propaganda in college, but I didn't even need any of that to be convinced that religion was evil. I developed that notion a long time ago. I didn't go anywhere liberal enough to have students pushing socialism (let alone communism) nor anywhere big enough to have an entrenched faculty doing the same. Schools depend on the notion that students will cough up money, or go into debt any

Sounds like the land owner didn't really have any say in it. Of course, I've no idea what the state of law enforcement is like in Belize, entirely possible that a big enough bribe would do the trick. From TFA:
"The Noh Mul complex sits on private land, but Belizean law states any pre-Hispanic ruins are under government protection."

I'll admit that I live in Canada and have only visited the States. IN both of these places insurance liabiltiy plays a great role in how people make decisions.

When I was a boy parks had the shallow pools that were filled in the summer. Barley up to your knees if you were 6 years old. Due to liability concerns these are not used any longer. They are unused except as a place for teens to sit at night, drink and break the glass bottle in.

This kind of destruction for the pettiest of reasons isn't anything new. In Malta, a group took a bulldozer to the stone temples at Mnajdra [sacred-destinations.com], a glorious megalithic site, older than Stonehenge and the Pyramids.
Mnajdra is breathtakingly lovely and enigmatic and fascinating. Fortunately, it's largely been restored and is again open to the public.
Why?
People had constructed illegal bird-hunting hides on the adjacent land and objected to their hides being destroyed. [maltatoday.com.mt]
People will be vicious destructive assholes for any number of reasons, including just because they can. Profit, sheer revelry in destruction (Persepolis), symbolism of dominance or victory (Summer Palace in Beijing), religious fanaticism (Buddha statues), a fanatical dislike of cities (Mongols and most of the cities in their way), to discourage attacks (Carthage), any number of reasons.

So tell me again, why is the first link for that story a bulshitty post on a New Zealand rightwing blog, with a blatantly misidentified picture? (this [7newsbelize.com] is what the actual temple looks like)

For chrissake, the blog post starts with "Reports are coming in", as if it was written by some international news channel, not some guy in his underwear sitting on the opposite side of the world.

Most of the posts in response to this story seem to focus on* Bad Grammar* Bad Jokes* US Politics (how the fuck everything can be related to US politics is beyond me)* Ethnic Slurs (including of course the obligatory insults to Muslims that must appear in any article on anything these days. Keep up the hate guys, its only helping your reputation with the rest of the world).* Lastly, and apparently leastly, some outrage at the destruction of a part of human history, thus lessening our understanding of the same by some degree. A site like this belongs to all of humanity, its our heritage, its a way to understand where we came from and thus perhaps where we might be going. The people who knocked this temple down (and the owner of the company responsible) should be in prison for the rest of their lives.Hopefully this at least serves to make governments all through the region aware of the need to protect heritage sites like this. Without our history, we are *nothing*.

A bit of common sense would ask "was there a sign posted next to Mayan pyramid?" I'm not sure about most of the world, but where I live there are historical markers all over the place. Even if it's to inform you where an old church use to stand or where someone was born in the wilderness.

Archaeologists can cry fowl all they want and file civil or criminal charges all they want. But did any of them even think to put a marker next to the mound of gravel and limestone saying this was a historical landmark?

This has happened countless times over history, this is far from unique. There is little evidence to think it will stop, unless it is more valuable as ruins.

Hadrian's Wall is a perfect example. "Hey free building stone sweet!" In this case it was used for roads, rather than dwellings. Old castles are subject to this as well. Heck the Vatican has destroyed a huge part of history, recycling ruins, particularly for valuable easily accessible marble, bronze, and just about anything from roman ruins. I am sure they felt that not only can they get great materials on the cheap, but also the destruction of heathen, pagan, temples is just a bonus!

Ironically I think there should be a special place in hell for those that intentionally destroy historical artifacts that that.

Now is a great time to go. The tourist areas are about as safe before, and nothing much has changed for visitors... except that things are less crowded and cheaper, what with so many scared tourists staying away. Stick to the main tourist centers and don't wander off alone at night, and you'll be a-ok.

Let's not forget it was one nutcase that decided that he wanted to take down the twin towers, and look what happened there. One nutcase ended up becoming an entire network of nutcases that eventually got the job done over a period of a decade or so!

Are you even sure it was a bad idea? They managed to take an small extremist group on the verge of collapse due to disinterest and lack of funding and give it an enemy that built it into a large and thriving terrorist network inspirational enough that mimics across the region adopted their name. If Osama actually cared a whit about the US that was probably another success - he managed, with the help of our totally disproportionate and chaotic response of course, to turn us from one of the most-loved nations in the world into a nation broadly considered to be one of the single greatest threats to global security. He may have underestimated just how useful his attack and the promise of perpetual war was going to be to certain tyrannical interests in the US government, and got himself killed due to our dogged persistence, but still, very nearly an unqualified success.

Greetings and Salutations;
I feel as if I am feeding the trolls here, although this is such a fantasy trip that it almost is insulting to trolls to compare it to them. Your re-writing of history is neither accurate nor anywhere near the facts. The fact of the matter is that the previous administration (a REPUBLICAN one) truly scared the world because it was so random and irrational. After all, Dubya, in response to a terrorist attack used bad data to justify an 11 year war on a country that did not have a bloody thing to do with 9/11. However, there was one telling conference where he spoke the truth about his motivations for going into Iraq. In the conference, when pressed on why Iraq and Saddam were a target he said "...he tried to kill my daddy...".
America's image in the world has taken many hits in the past few decades, thanks to the two-faced dealings we have had with many countries, and, the brutal dictatorships we have supported. When Pres. Obama was elected, there was dancing in the streets in other countries because they thought, finally, a very intelligent, rational person was at the controls, and, the actions that caused America to lose face would change. They, did not realize that America is a huge ship, and, it takes a lot of time an ocean to turn it around. They also did not realize how much the Republicans hated Pres. Obama, and, how they would do anything they could to force him to fail. These, and other factors, have caused his presidency to be far less effective than it could have been.
So...do not fool yourself. America has not been the "most loved" country in the world for a long time. We might still have a chance to get there, but, it will take time, and a change in attitudes of the representatives in the Federal government away from competition and towards actually doing things that are good for the country as a whole.

I know that you religious people get butt-hurt when people point out that you are evil, but let's face it, the Catholic church is and has always been a criminal conspiracy. No one who knows anything about its history can deny this.

Some Catholics have done some truly horrible things , and their leaders actively worked to suppress that information and prevent criminal charges from being filed therefore the Catholic Church is a vast criminal conspiracy.

FTFY. This is of course ignoring indulgences, the crusades, religious persecution, etc.

I tend to slightly agree, but Muzzie is a slur against the entire religion, not just the minority of fanatic sects that use the name. An analog might be calling people ChristWhores because you disagree with the fanatisism of the Christian Scientists.

I prefer that he does use the ethnic slur -- as well as the personal attacks, foul language, anger, and hate -- that way we immediately know his age (teenager), and therefore his credibility (zero). This makes slashdot more efficient for those of us who come here for knowledge.

In other words, if he was polite and courteous, I would need to spend more time and effort on evaluating his position. The anger and hate reduces my workload.

To be fair. It is not like you could trust anything that the people in power or the government over there have to say any more than "one nutcase".In fact, I don't know the nutcase so he may very well be correct. I have had some experience with what the government over there says and does...So I might be more inclined to believe some random nutcase over the government over there.

It is not like you could trust anything that the people in power or the government over there have to say any more than "one nutcase".

I wonder why you make the distinction, "over there." Have you not been watching what's been happening over here? "People who live in glass houses..." and all that, ya know?

It often appears to me these days that Soviet and Nazi era policies have been exported and happily embraced by pretty much all the world, and hardly anybody expects, or is offering, any apologies. Curious. Progress?

To assign credibility as though it were linked to politesse does more damage to information than radical Islam has already done to Buddha statues.It may be easy to call out "nutcase" for those who offend your " sensibilities", but recall that todays nutcase is tomorrows leader. Try it with a pinch of salt, but, if you are just hearing this here,now, it is surely closer to reality there. If you are hearing only one Muslim voice, what about those you don't hear?Perhaps you should check yourself once or twice

Idiot. How many hideous acts does one group have to commit to get moved from the "racist slur" pile to the "enemy of civilization" pile?

I don't know, I'm not a piler. Help me out. Does the Tuskegee Syphilis Study count as just one hideous act, or should it be one for each infected black man who was given fake treatments? What about all the children born with congenital syphilis, do they count extra since their damage is incurable? Do all forty years of the study count, or just the 30 years when syphilis

You stupid fuck, when the British wanted to build a railroad in Bolivia and there weren't any handy gravel deposits nearby they smashed up big chunks of Tiahuanacu. You can still see pieces of statues in the foundations for the railroad bridges in the area. Greed and laziness will win out over respect for the past pretty much every time that money is involved.

This is nothing new. Just look throughout the Middle East and Europe and you'll find all kinds of plundered and recycled architecture. Mostly because it's easier to have your stone masons rework something to fit rather than carve something from scratch.

The Great Mosque of Kairouan is a good example where it used to be punishable by death to count the columns. The real reason is they didn't want people looking at them too closely because they were mostly stolen from places like Carthage and are a mix of Gree

Yup - here in Oslo, an abandoned monastery (and many other old buildings) got picked to pieces for the stone - it was easier to go there and pick the materials you needed, than to quary new materials. There are probably tons of similar examples in every old city.

Napoleon's troops in Egypt were using the Sphinx for target practice. But it is not always racist. Chinese have been quarrying their great wall for bricks for ages. Many Italian homes were built using recycled bricks from the aqueducts. Stone tablets inscribed with royal decrees being used as washing stones...

No race of people and no culture is without its flaws. Maybe the half-breeds got the worst of everything? Rapacious greed of the Western European race/culture with the short-sightedness of those that evolved in equatorial climates? Snake eyes of the gene pool.

He didn't claim they were responsible. The words "GOP mecca" means something like "GOP dream world". As in what the GOP would like to turn the USA into (even more than the US already is) - a place where the people with money can buy their way into getting anything they want.

Yea, OK, so why single out the GOP?

If you stop paying attention to the lip-service and instead note only their actions, there is very, very little difference between Democrats and Republicans.